› added 12 years ago

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TIL, when Green day singer Billie Joe Armstrong’s father died when he was a child. He ran home from the funeral and locked himself in his room. When his mother followed him home and asked him to come out. He told her to “wake me up when september ends.”

JgE1 TIL 10-year old Tilly Smith saved her family and 100 other tourists from the 2004 Asian tsunami, by recognizing signs of tsunamis she had learned in a geography lesson two weeks before.
a8M1A TIL Winston Churchill would attend Shakespeare plays and recite the lines along with the actors from the front row. Richard Burton, playing Hamlet at the Old Vic theatre, tried to shake Churchill by changing the speed of his delivery, but Churchill stayed with him the whole way.
wXE7 TIL that Florida passed a law requiring toddlers in state-run schools to listen to classical music every day, and in 1998 the governor of Georgia budgeted $105,000 per year to provide every child born in Georgia with a tape or CD of classical music.
X6JX TIL that after he was shot down on May 1, 1960, U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was subjected to a show trial in Moscow, during which he was very calm and dignified during the trial. However, he was sharply criticized later in the American media for not committing suicide.
R7J68 TIL: In 2005, because of a programming error, a virtual plague spread through World of Warcraft. The servers had to be shut down because NPCs and players killed off entire in-game cities. Researchers of disease analyzed and studied the event as a model for the spread of plague IRL.